Bulls, Goats, and Pedagogy: Engaging Students in Overseas Development Aid William F. S. Miles, Northeastern University ABSTRACT This article illustrates the profound learning that occurs—for students and instruc- tor alike—when a class on third-world development attempts to undertake foreign aid. With undergraduate, graduate, and departmental money, I purchased bulls and carts for farmers, and goats for widows, in two West African villages. Such experiential learning personalized for students the study of micropolitics under conditions of poverty, the devel- opment of organizational structure, and north-south dependency. GENESIS OF AN ALTRUISTIC LEARNING PROJECT Through the General Assembly of the United Nations, the world community has identified 0.7% of gross national income as the appropriate level of assistance for each industrialized nation to allocate toward international development. Given the subject nature of my course, and the profile of my university (self- consciously in the vanguard of “experiential education” (see Can- tor 1997; Lempert 1996), and “service learning” (see Canada and Speck 2001; Speck and Hoppe 2004)), I proposed that 0.7% of the tuition generated from student enrollment in my class on the Politics of Developing Nations (PDN) be rolled back to the course for pedagogic-cum-development purposes. (My proposal also invoked the Earth Institute project managed out of Colombia University, which tests the hypothesis that U.N.-designated test villages can be lifted out of poverty with directly targeted project aid of $110 per capita [Sachs 2005].) While my dean congratu- lated me for “thinking outside of the box,” he nixed the idea. Fortunately, I have an enlightened department chair who, in his role as town councilor, had personal experience in developing sister-city relationships between Massachusetts and Central Amer- ica. He offered department matching funds for monies donated by the students themselves. Even without the matching fund offer, students were eager to “do something” after I presented on the two neighboring West African villages with which I have had an ongoing relationship, as researcher, since the early 1980s. (The research, focusing on the long-term legacies of the superimposed colonial boundary dividing the Hausa people and published in the APSR [Miles and Rochefort 1991] was an outgrowth of my experience as a Peace CorpsVolunteer in Niger from 1977 to 1979.) The two communities fall into the “dollar-a-day” per capita income bracket used by the World Bank to define “the poorest of the poor.” As described in an article in the African Studies Review (Miles 2008b), this first class (PDN-I) voluntarily proffered hundreds of dollars of their own money to finance latrines in the designated Nigérien village. 1 Diversion of this money for purchase of school furniture in another village entirely (after the principal had been reassigned, ostensibly for political reasons) generated lively class- room discussion. So did the principal’s request for a cell phone. Direct correspondence between a school principal from the least-developed country in the world (according to the U.N. Human Development Index), and college students from the most power- ful one, had a deep impact. It made real and personal “The Chal- lenge of Third World Development” (the title of our class text [Handelman 2003]). However unintentionally, it also personal- ized, more than could any classroom discussion, the meaning of dependency. But it also energized some students to improve and expand upon their efforts. Accordingly, an enthusiast from PDN-I willingly agreed to address her successors in PDN-II when I offered the class the following semester. DEVELOPMENT ENTHUSIASM REDUX Students of PDN II contributed their own money to purchase a bull and a cart in Yardaje, the neighboring village in Nigeria. (A colleague from the sociology department of Shepherd University in West Virginia, originally from The Gambia, suggested it as one idea among several.) This is how I presented the offer to the pro- spective beneficiaries, in correspondence with a schoolteacher in the community. [My] students . . . have taken great interest in Yardaje, to which I have introduced them. Although they are not rich, they have decided to reach into their own pockets to invest in a development project there. These students, most of whose signatures appear below, wish to purchase a plow and plow animal. They will be the owners. The plow and plow animal will be made available for hire on a daily basis in Yardaje. However, the destitute of the village will not have to pay. It is expected that whoever uses the animal will provide for its feed for the day of its use. We requested cost estimates for bull or ox, cart, plow, harness, and daily hire. Explicitly invoked, so as to avoid the foreseeable pitfalls of outright donation (dependency; diffused ownership and responsibility), was the culturally operative concept of this William F. S. Miles is professor of political science at Northeastern University in Bos- ton and adjunct research professor of international relations at the Watson Institute of Brown University. A former Peace Corps Volunteer (Niger, 1977–9) and State Depart- ment intern (Nigeria,1980), he is the recipient of four Fulbright scholarships. Miles has pub- lished nine books on Africa, India, Israel, Martinique, and Vanuatu, the most recent of which is My African Horse Problem (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). The Teacher ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. doi:10.1017/S1049096509090179 PS • January 2009 181